The face of a subject includes identification features that may provide information specific to that subject. Such information may, for example, include the identity, gender, age, ethnicity, facial expression, and so forth, of the subject.
Recently, further efforts have been made to develop methods that may facilitate automated recognition and/or verification of the identity of a subject with robustness to different variations, such as, for example, poses, illumination conditions and/or occlusions, and aspiring to human performance capability.
A problem that may be associated with some of these methods is that they are developed on a basis of a training image gallery including various images collected for a subject in a given age. Naturally, the performance capability of such previously-proposed methods is reduced when applied to the facial progression of subjects in ages differing from that used in the compilation of the training image gallery. Such reduced performance capability may be attributed to the fact that age progression is a relatively complex process that may affect at least one of a shape and appearance of the face of a subject. It may be possible to improve the performance capability of such previously-proposed methods by updating the training image gallery with images of the given subject in different ages, but this is relatively time and resource consuming.
Regarding the age progression of the face of a given subject in different age-groups, some previously-proposed methods in this regard may be limited by: the requisite of a minimum age of the subject in an input image that is to be processed and/or for such an input image to be in a frontal pose with a neutral expression; sensitivity to any kind of occlusions, such as, for example, hair, sunglasses and so forth, and such age progression is not performed with consideration to the progression of both appearance and face shape of the subject.
Accordingly, the ability to provide enhanced age progression methods that alleviates the drawbacks associated with previously-proposed methods is an area of interest and continued research for, for instances, establishing commercial advantage in the industry. For instance, it is desirable to be able to age progress the face of a given subject, as provided in an input image that has been collected in situ rather than placing the given subject in a considered and/or specialized context, over a broad age spectrum.